The First Border to Dissolve
Recordar [1]
By Sharmini Aphrodite
I was 18 when I read Sandra Cisneros for the first time, during a time when everything I knew was changing. It was December and I had picked up a copy of her collection My Wicked Wicked Ways from the library, and then I had gone to my maternal family’s kampung in Sabah. So there was rain and the chitter of the jungle, and alongside me, Cisneros. It felt like whatever voice was in the book was speaking directly to me, the tone conspiratorial—as though Cisneros was letting me in on a secret—and brash in the casual way that longtime friends are with each other. Over the years, I have returned to her writing. It has been seven years since that December, but when I pick up her work, or reread a scrap of it somewhere by chance, I am reminded of that time. Cisneros’ writing has the quality of an elegy: it signals to the past while retaining an eternal heart, like rain pouring into the jungle, giving life again to the dark earth.
Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros’ only short story collection to date, was published 30 years ago, on April 3rd 1991. Cisneros herself was born in 1954 in Chicago—the only girl in her parents’ brood of seven—and raised in the working-class area of Humboldt Park. Her Mexican father married her American mother (also of Mexican heritage) and supported the family as an upholsterer, beginning a “compulsive circular migration between both Chicago and Mexico City that became the dominating pattern of Cisneros’ childhood.” All these experiences are evoked in her writing, which is primarily concerned with borders of all kinds, and the ways in which they are crossed.
Woman Hollering Creek is divided into three sections: (I) My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn, (II) One Holy Night, and (III) There Was A Man, There Was a Woman. Although none of the stories are narratively connected, there is a chronology to their arrangement: the stories in the first section are told through the perspectives of young girls, the stories in the second are told by adolescent girls. The third and final section comprises stories told from the perspective of women. Apart from this feminine perspective, two other perspectives that connect these characters are the fact that they are all of Mexican heritage—whether they are residing in the United States or Mexico—and that nearly all of them come from a working-class or poor background. All three of these characteristics (femininity; culture; class) are characterized as states of suspension: Cisneros’ women always seemed poised on the edge of something, never quite landing; her characters shuttle—physically and mentally—between Mexico and the US; and to be poor, as Cisneros elaborates, is to be stuck in a liminal space that is difficult to escape. As I read these stories again in 2021, I mulled on what—if anything—had changed in the three decades between their publication and now. Cisneros’ characters represent fissures larger than themselves—fissures of history and geography. Correspondingly, I wondered how the issues raised in her work have changed—or not changed—since publication? What is the precise quality of Cisneros’ writing that allows it to remain timeless, that lies at the heart of her writing?
Let’s start with two stories in which these fissures are most explicit, working backwards through the collection and moving from larger historical and political contexts into more private, personal ones. The stories are: “Eyes of Zapata” and “Little Miracles, Kept Promises.”
“Eyes of Zapata” is about the narrator’s relationship with the revolutionary figure Emiliano Zapata. One of the leading figures of the Mexican Revolution, Zapata helmed a peasant revolution in his home state of Morelos. In pictures found online, one can see an echo of the effect he must have had in real life. His eyes pierce through decades; there is an urgency to the way that he holds himself, like a coiled snake waiting to strike. It is quite easy to see why Cisneros wrote about him, why she called upon his memory through the eyes of a lover. There exists the temptation to be romantic about the past because it is one way of holding on to it: our intimacy ensures that we will always be entwined in its embrace, that we will not be without the foothold that history provides. The narrator meets Zapata when they are both young, and over the years she continues to love him and only him, even while he has relationships with women throughout the country. In instances of her trademark magic, Cisneros writes:
It was the season of rain… All night I listened to that broken string of pearls, bead upon bead upon bead rolling across the waxy leaves of my heart.
...
I remember how your skin burned to the touch. How you smelled of lemongrass and smoke… Something undid itself—gently, like a braid of hair unravelling.
This is writing in which the minute is sanctified. A heart is like a leaf blessed by rainwater; both the rain and the muscle exalted by love. A braid of hair evokes a lovers’ dance, illustrating the fine thread that makes the mundane cosmic. This is writing as a form of prayer. What the philosopher Simone Weil, talking about God, describes as “absolutely unmixed attention.” There is nothing too small for worship, even amidst the turmoil of history.
In “Eyes of Zapata,” this writing weaves between lovers and the world around them. History slips through more minute, personal lives, heightening the stakes. The narrator with her all-seeing eye is a bridge from the present to the future, and also to the past. In the end, Zapata is assassinated, killed by men he trusted for a bounty. The narrator, during one of her visions, sees this future:
I rise higher and higher, the house shutting itself like an eye… And I see our past and our future, Miliano, one single thread already lived and nothing to do about it. And I see the face of the man who will betray you. The place and the hour.
But neither the narrator nor Mexico’s story ends with Zapata’s death. The story goes on, shifting again between the future—as Zapata’s son argues with the government over land issues—and the past, in which the narrator recalls moments of intimacy between them. The agrarian reforms that Zapata had aided—which ensured, or intended to ensure, that farmers and peasants would have some right to the land they worked—succeeded to some measure. In 1994, 75 years after Zapata’s death, three years after the publication of the collection, the Zapatistas were founded. A socialist organization consisting of mostly indigenous Mexicans from rural areas, the date of the Zapatistas’ founding coincided with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). [2] NAFTA was considered a direct challenge to the rights of indigenous peasants, the poor, and the working class throughout North America.
Today, the Zapatistas are still working, long after the man they were named after was returned to the earth. Although their presence now is smaller, more insular, at the height of their movement they had transnational links and support from global indigenous, anti-neoliberal, and labor movements. One of their more famous slogans is this—para todos todo, para nosotros nada. For everyone, everything. For us, nothing. While the revolutionaries of Zapata’s era have long passed on, a trace of their spirit still lingers in the jungles.
“Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” which follows, is told in a series of vignettes, comprising letters, prayers, or the text of retablos—devotional handmade paintings—given by worshipers to God/Christ, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and various other saints. These vignettes are thanksgivings or pleas; they detail the problems of the unnamed worshipers. There are personal requests for new lovers or to preserve current love affairs, but there are also pieces that reveal the structure of the community that worships at the church where these vignettes are found. References are made to unemployment, to (in Spanish) a prayer for a successful graduation from high school, to drugs, to employers who deliberately withhold their workers’ wages. This is not a wealthy neighborhood, it is also populated by immigrants or the children of immigrants. From one of the vignettes, it is clear that this church is located somewhere in San Antonio, a city in Texas that was once a part of the nation of Mexico.
The presence of the Mexico-US Border is alluded to through these vignettes. In the story, the border not only divides Mexico and the US, but the Global South and the North. This is a dividing line that runs through the earth, cutting not only through the Americas, but Asia as well. The parallels between Latin America and my native region of Southeast Asia have long interested me. Both regions share similarities of geography (they are latitudinal cousins) and history; colonialism [3] and American imperialism [4] have affected both. The line between “developed” and “developing” worlds also has a Southeast Asian example: the border between my home in Johor Bahru (Malaysia) and Woodlands (Singapore). The fall of the value of the Ringgit over the years inversely mirrored a rise in Malaysians working in Singapore. [5] A pre-pandemic look at traffic on the Causeway—the crowd heading into Singapore in the morning for work, and home to Malaysia in the evening—gives some idea of the divide between both nations.
One can also divine regional politics through the Mexico-US Border. News from that Border often describes illegal crossings, drug trafficking, violence and poverty. In 1991, when Creek was published, the War on Drugs, which spurred much of this violence, reached fever-pitch at the death of Pablo Escobar. In the past few years, the Border again found its way into the spotlight. While many Americans celebrated the recent Democrat victory at their 2020 elections, one should note that attitudes to the Border, the working-class, and Latin America, might only change superficially. In December it was announced, for instance, that Biden would be continuing Plan Colombia, which funds military operations that allow US companies to benefit from the exploitation of the Latin American nation’s natural resources, thinly-disguised as a project that aims to curb drug trafficking. [6] The working-class has been shunted aside in recent decades by both Republican and Democrat administrations. [7] The issues raised in “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” are still pertinent today. Cisneros’ story, in 1991, captured these issues through small devotionals: prayers of thanksgiving or beseechment, hand-crafted desires. It is the minute that captures the large swell of history, the way a sherd of pottery might gesture to the existence of a lost kingdom.
This penchant for the intimate tunnels through the collection. In Woman Hollering Creek, the borders are not just between nations, but between private, individual lives, mapped between bodies.
“Eyes of Zapata” has the collection’s largest scope, but even then, its politics are wrapped up in the everyday. In stories like “Bien Pretty” and “Never Marry a Mexican” (both still in Part III), Cisneros depicts the blurring of borders through the body, as the narrator reflects on her relationship with Flavio, a Mexican immigrant to California. In the realm of the physical, everything collapses together. For instance:
I held Flavio close to me, in the mouth of my heart, inside my wrists
(from “Bien Pretty”)
In both stories, the narrators’ lovers are married to other women. There yet another transgression occurs—not of actual borders, perhaps, but nonetheless of marital boundaries. There is the sense of a cultural tension in the stories as well. The narrator’s love interest in “Bien Pretty” is Mexican (as are his wives; although the narrator here is unaware of his marriages), and that is what draws the narrator towards him—she is seeking in him a sense of home and identity that she has not felt as a Chicana, a Mexican who was raised in the United States. She is attempting to cross a border to return to a nebulous idea of home, hoping to cohere her dual selves in what she perceives as his Mexican singularity. But life rarely works that simplistically. In the end she is left by herself, her body the only country she has left to claim. Borders of culture and nationality are navigated through the body, made porous by moments of connection. And the heart—as Cisneros describes in one of her poems [8]—is an anarchist that pays no attention to borders. It tramples through all kinds of frontiers.
These experiences highlight another commonality of Cisneros’ characters: their experiences as girls and women. This is an experience that, in her signature prose, Cisneros captures to startling effect. There is a sort of recognition through Cisneros’ writing on these matters, as if one is looking into a mirror again after a long time. I first read Cisneros at 18 and am now 25. Yet I recognize her characters at every age. This is not to say that Cisneros’ characters and I have had the same experiences or done the same things, but rather that her writing has a universal quality. It plumbs the heart of things, laying her characters bare, inviting readers in through intimacy. Cisneros’ devotional attention to physical and emotional detail gives life to her characters. This earnestness is also captured in Cisneros’ rendering of working-class and poor experiences, which is the third commonality of her characters.
Cisneros’ women are perpetual hunters, always chasing after something; a hunt spurred by the desire not to be the hunted. This latter sentiment is spurred by class; to be poor is to be wary of always being considered prey. Cisneros’ younger characters, teenagers in “My Tocaya and One Holy Night,” deal with the spectre of disappearing classmates, of violence enacted against girls and children. In “One Holy Night,” a man preys on an adolescent girl who helps her grandmother man their fruit cart. They enter a relationship, the girl falls pregnant, and is subsequently abandoned by the man. Later it is discovered that he has murdered a series of girls like her. While such violence is indiscriminate (such a character would have preyed on anyone they perceived as powerless), it is the girl’s class that has put her in the specific material situation which has made her so vulnerable to circumstances like these. In “My Tocaya,” a girl talks about the disappearance of a classmate, who is believed to have run away because the narrator thinks she is “tired of smelling like stinky tacos” from the shop in which her parents work. Class appears in Cisneros’ fiction not in a way that is didactic, but through little details like this olfactory one, weaving its way like scent until it becomes part of the fabric, invisible but still present. The situations may appear bleak, but Cisneros also has a mischievous streak that infuses her stories with a sense of joy despite everything. In the hands of a writer performing the fictional equivalent of “slumming it,” the stories might appear sordid and mawkish, or paternalistic, but Cisneros writes with empathy and—frankly speaking—love. Her women are saved by solidarity: a woman working in a clinic recognizes the signs of domestic abuse and helps engineer an escape; a grandmother’s hand on her granddaughter’s head offers comfort. There is always a kindness in her work that allows them salvation, no matter how briefly.
This sense of sisterhood exists also between the children that Cisneros writes about in the stories that make up (I) My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn:
What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one… You feel like you’re still ten. And you are — underneath the year that makes you eleven
(from “Eleven”)
The passage underlines the sensitivity that Cisneros possesses which allows her characters to feel so real. Cisneros manages to capture both the adult and the child because she understands that we—all of us, not just women—are the product of anything that has ever happened to us, that the borders within us are malleable. We are not just one thing: we are the product of everything.
Likewise, in her characters’ relationships with their loved ones, borders between the self and the other are also dissolved. Best friends are as close and beloved as family, as Cisneros’ characters discover as children. And while it is true that the women in the collection find this dissolution of borders through ill-fated love affairs instead, it is also true that there exists a moment in which those borders were crossed. Even if only briefly, a shared connection can dissipate borderlands. Or, as Cisneros more acutely puts it:
I don’t know anything about this Tao business, but I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity only lasts five minutes.
(from “Bien Pretty”)
While the issues of class, geography, and history raised in Woman Hollering Creek are still persistent and pertinent today, so, too, is this seemingly smaller, more private idea—the porosity of the immediate borders around us when we encounter moments of shared grace. Moments through which we see the other as something as important as the self, which is its own act of solidarity. Or, to echo the words of another Latin American figure, Father Gustavo Gutierrez [9]—true love exists only among equals, for love affects a likeness between the lover and the object loved.
Perhaps it would be best to end then, at the beginning, with the collection’s first story about two childhood friends:
And when we look at each other, our arms gummy from an orange popsicle we split, we could be sisters right? We could be you and me waiting for our teeths to fall and money… Her and me, my Lucy friend who smells like corn.
(from “My Lucy Friend who Smells Like Corn”)
In the end there is nowhere to begin except the space right next to yours. This is the first border that one can dissolve.
Notes
[1] “Recordar: [Spanish for] to remember: from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart” — Galeano, E. 1992. The Book of Embraces, W W Norton, New York City
[2] Gulewitsch, N. (2011). Ya Basta! A cry that echoes beyond borders: Zapatismo and international solidarity networks in the height of the Zapatista Uprising. McGill Sociological Review, Vol. 2, pp. 77-91. Available at https://www.mcgill.ca/msr/volume2/article5. (accessed 7 February 2021)
[3] Latin America was mostly colonised by Spain, although France and Portugal also had colonies in the region; while Southeast Asia was colonised by various empires — the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Spain and the United States.
[4] Reference to the United States’ parallel activities in both regions: [a] the backing of dictators such as Trujillo in Latin America and [b] Marcos in Southeast Asia; and [b] backing right-wing coups in [c] Southeast Asia (alongside their more well-known Cold War bombings of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam) and [d] Latin America
[a] NA. (1961). “The Emperor Trujillo”, The Harvard Crimson, 2 June. Available at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1961/6/2/the-emperor-trujillo-pit-was-no/ (accessed 8 February 2020)
[b] Ramiro, R., Shashahani, S. (2018). “America’s Indefensible Alliance with the Philippines”, Huffpost, 23 Feb. Available at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-ramiro-duterte-philippines_n_5a8f3c57e4b01e9e56b9cae1 (accessed 5 March 2021)
[c] Bevins, V. (2017). “What the United States did in Indonesia”, The Atlantic, 20 October. Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/the-indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534/ (accessed 8 February 2021)
[d] Weisbrot, M. (2020). “Silence Reigns on the US-backed Coup Against Evo Morales in Bolivia”, The Guardian, 18 Sep. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/18/silence-us-backed-coup-evo-morales-bolivia-american-states (accessed 5 March 2021)
[5] The value of the Ringgit declined steeply in 2015. Various reasons were suggested for this fall: the slowdown of the Chinese economy and the political turmoil surrounding the 1MDB scandal in Malaysia among them. Kurlantzick, J. (2015). “Malaysia’s Economy Faces Severe Strain”, The Diplomat, 29 August. Available at https://thediplomat.com/2015/08/malaysias-economy-faces-severe-strain/ (accessed 5 March 2021)
[6] Guevara, V. (2020). “Biden will Continue Plan Colombia, President Duque Affirms”, Diaspora Tribune, 10 December. Available at https://diasporatribune.com/biden-will-continue-plan-colombia-president-duque-affirms/ (accessed 7 February 2021)
[7] On the Democratic Party’s relationship with the working-class and poor: Halle, J. (2016). “Review: Listen, Liberal”, Current Affairs, 18 August. Available at https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/08/review-listen-liberal (accessed 7 February 2021)
[8] One Last Poem for Richard
[9] Father Gutierrez is a Peruvian philosopher and theologian, known for being one of the founders of Liberation Theology. The nexus of theology and socio-economic analysis, Liberation Theology was founded in Latin America in the 1960s in response to poverty in the region.
Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Kota Kinabalu and raised between the cities of Singapore and Johor Bahru, where she still lives. Her short fiction appears online and in print and was shortlisted in 2020 for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her art writing appears online.